Readers React: The Times’ opinion poetry stirs readers’ souls

On Sunday, The Times’ Opinion section published a handful of the roughly 1,000 submissions it received in response to its call for opinionated poetry. The letters from readers reacting to the selected poems included more entries (deadlines, anyone?), poetic replies to the published pieces and critiques written in prose.

Because the poems on Sunday were lighthearted, the reader responses made for some entertaining reading in a week dominated by hard, even distressing news. Here are several of those letters.

Los Angeles resident John Stickler belatedly submits his limerick:

The Times is to be commended for encouraging the creation of poetry, of any sort. With submissions from all over the world, you assembled a marvelous collection.

I was expecting some snarky little limericks, however, and was disappointed not to find even one. How about something like this?

Locals who watched their walls cracking

Found drillers nearby busy fracking.

Sacramento (yeah, no surprise)

Said, “Hey, don’t hassle those guys.

Ol’ Jerry’s given his backing!”

Malibu resident Gerald Benecke agitates for change, in verse:

I’ve read ‘em all

So make this call.

Fire the writers

And hire the blighters!

Al Ramrus of Pacific Palisades critiques some of the selections:

Congratulations to The Times on “Rhyme and Reason,” in which your readers were invited to submit their own poetry, a feature designed to encourage the public’s love of verse and command of literacy. But I take issue with a couple of the poems and with your editorial judgment in selecting them.

George Waters’ poem is titled “Sonnet on a Red-Blue Hiatus,” and it contains just eight lines. Originating in Italy in the 13th century, a sonnet is a fixed verse of exactly 14 lines. Anything more or less is not a sonnet.

Jean Koch waxes eloquently against bad grammar, but errs grammatically when she counsels: “Put prepositions where they belong/ Not at the end. That is all wrong.”

An editor once rewrote a sentence of Winston Churchill’s in which Churchill ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill reportedly fired back, “This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

Gordon Cohn of Long Beach adds to a list of grammatical gripes:

Brava to Jean Koch. No one seems to know the difference between “lie” and “lay.” In every doctor’s office I visit I am asked to “lay down.” People regularly tell me they have never heard the word “lain.”

Perhaps she will now turn her gifted attention to “who” and “whom,” “rise” and “raise,” and particularly the proper use of the nominative and objective cases, so that one need never again hear such utterances as “between you and I,” or as one local sports broadcaster recently said, “It’s Steve’s and I’s opinion.”

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